Not really. If I'm a business and need to contact my customers and can just call them or text them on SMS or third party messenger platforms. Apple does not gatekeep me from reaching out to them. But if I'm a business and want to sell my customers an app, then Apple is the gatekeeper for the iOS platform, as I can't distribute my app to my customers with Apple devices any other way.

Similar with people. In EU nobody I know defaults to iMessages so it's not a big issue here.

To be fair to the EU, it's not widely used by people in the EU either.

Part of the issue is that here in the US we think Apple is bigger than it is. Maybe it's an important messaging network here in the US, but everywhere else, it's just a phone. A nice one. But still just a phone.

To be fair, it's not "just a phone". iPhone integrates with the whole Apple ecosystem, so I can copy text on my phone and paste it on my Mac without thinking about it, or AirDrop a large file, or use it as a remote control for my Apple TV, and so forth.

It's just as much part of the Apple ecosystem everywhere in the world, even if you don't use iMessage. You're not getting anything like that if you're using Android and a PC. Which may be fine depending on your needs. But iMessage isn't the only differentiator here.

Not a lot of people here uses a Mac either. Why spend 1500 euros on a Mac when you can buy a windows laptop for 500-700 that does everything the Mac does.

Because it tends to last for 2-3 times as long and still holds resale value when you finally choose to upgrade.

Because of this, entry-level Macs are often actually cheaper in the long run -- and with the M chips they're faster too. And of course generally provide a much higher-quality experience, like trackpad quality, screen quality, etc.

Yeah until they die because the not changeable SSDs has reached their cycles. I see many old ThinkPads still humming in the university library, but not many old macs.

Extraordinarily few people reach the cycle limit of the SSD on their Mac. That's not something to worry about for probably 99.999% of people, so it's just a weird thing to bring up.

And how do you know you're not seeing many old MacBooks? The MBA was launched over a decade and a half ago and it still looks almost identical to a casual observer.

That's why there are so many reports about M1 Notebooks dying after 3/4 years out there.

There are huge noticeable differences between a 10 year MBA and a recent one

Except there aren't reports of that. Just tried googling and couldn't find anything about SSD failure actually happening. What I did find was some fearmongering back in 2021 about whether it might become a thing, but it seems like it was entirely hypothetical and never actually happened.

Also the M1 has only been around for a little over 3 years. They can't be dying after 4 years because they're not that old.

Where are you getting all this misinformation from? And why are you motivated to be repeating it?

Then try again. Rossmann Made a video about it, here is another article talking about it https://www.sir-apfelot.de/en/ssd-failures-in-macbook-models...

You may be thinking of the bugs that were present in the very first generation of M1s, that caused them to erroneously display a wear level much higher than they were actually experiencing.

And as long as you have the Silver color option, a MacBook Air from 2023 looks very much like a MacBook Air from 2014 if you're not stopping and looking closely at it.

If you have one of the colored ones, those date back to 2018 with, again, a very similar design to today's.

[citation needed] Lot of bold claims there about longevity.

You also forgot "still holds resale value until they drop support for your model in macOS, and then software stops supporting the macOS version you're able to run"

Ask me how I know!

Because it offers a premium experience and NA buyers have a 50% higher disposable income than EU buyers.

Why buy an Audi when a Volkswagen does the same thing for 50% of the cost?

You absolutely can do those kinds of things between Windows and Android. For clipboard, Microsoft has a cloud clipboard between SwiftKey and Windows. KDE connect lets you send your clipboard to another device on the local WiFi, or toss files over local WiFi to another device with KDE Connect.

KDE Connect also lets me use my phone as a remote for my Windows machine.

If the European Commission were to regulate something that almost nobody in the EU actually uses, Apple probably would have an easy time convincing courts that the EC overstepped their mandate.